Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Seer, Sere

Not Ron Silliman (Ray Kroc)

I see th’indefatigable Ron Silliman’s toeing heartily to the Krocean line first noted at th’Hotel somewheres (something about the way th’arches used to spell out 99 Billion Served). Now it’s product placement charts. Outpost upsprings in the distant outbacks of Gdansk and Kokkola, just the thing for the year-end corporate glossies. Keeping the shareholders happy. Myself, I look forward fondly to the moment the technology reports a Silliman “hit” originating smack dab off the middle of the Champs Elysées. Ah, th’imperial city! (In the vicinity: reports of French-Maghreb youth brandishing roll’d up print-outs of recent Jane Dark’s Sugar High! posts . . .)

~

Amused in Lowry’s Under the Volcano by some minor character’s brouhaha about “modern Vancouver,” (circa 1938-9) and how it’s got:

. . . a kind of Pango Pango quality mingled with sausage and mash and generally a rather Puritan atmosphere. Everyone fast asleep and when you prick them a Union Jack flows out of the hole. But no one in a certain sense lives there. They merely as it were pass through. Mine the country and quit. Blast the land to pieces, knock down the trees and send them rolling down Burrard Inlet . . . As for drinking, by the way, that is beset . . . everywhere beset by perhaps favourable difficulties. No bars, only beer parlors so uncomfortable and cold that serve beer so weak no self-respecting drunkard would show his nose in them. You have to drink at home, and when you run short it’s too far to get a bottle—

The ventriloquism of Cormac McCarthy’s sheriff in No Country for Old Men, absolutely convincing:

What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything? I’ve thought about it a good deal. But he wasnt nothin compared to what was comin down the pike. They say the eyes are the windows to the soul. I dont know what them eyes was the windows to and I guess I’d as soon not know. But there is another view of the world out there and other eyes to see it and that’s where this is goin. It has done brought me to a place in my life I would not of thought I’d of come to . . . I always knew that you had to be wlliin to die to even do this job. That was always true. Not to sound glorious about it or nothin but you do. If you aint they’ll know it. They’ll see it in a heartbeat. I think it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that . . .

Entirely fickle reading habits. Stuck in McCarthy’s Texan county of Judge Roy Bean (Formed from the Pecos, Kinney, and Crockett counties, Val Verde officially became a county in 1885 and is 3,242 square miles in area—which is three times the size of Rhode Island. Election records from that year show that Langtry citizen Roy Bean was elected to serve as Justice of the Peace. Legend has it that Bean so greatly admired the English actress Lillie Langtry that he took her last name for the name of his town, and he named his saloon after her nickname, “Jersey Lily.” Unfortunately, a sign painter misspelled “Lily” and the sign still reads “The Jersey Lilly.”) and stay’d up half the blame night reading it.